So even though MSNBC had already reported that information contained in a Hillary Clinton email was not classified, Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough decided to just ignore that revelation and carry on with his smear campaign by pretending that it was.
Scarborough said on his show yesterday that the thing about Hillary Clinton is that “she says things on television that she knows are not true,” and that “the press knows is not true” (that would be you, Joe) and that in general “people following the story know is not true” (presumably, including Scarborough and his writers and producers) even while himself saying things on television that he knows are not true, because his own network had just debunked them.
You will remember that on October 7, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the head of the Select Committee on Benghazi, sent a letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) claimed that said Hillary Clinton “apparently received classified information” at her personal email address from Sidney Blumenthal while still secretary of state.
This prompted some fear-mongering on the October 12 episode of Morning Joe, but then in an October 18 reply to Gowdy covered by his own network, Cummings said, “You failed To check your facts before you made it, and the CIA has now informed The Select Committee that you were wrong.”
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
Surely Scarborough, or somebody on his show, must have been aware of this taking place on his own network that morning on Way Too Early:
It’s not like somebody failed to pick up the morning newspaper before Scarborough went on air. This was on TV – on his own network. Host Amy Holmes not only talked about Cummings’ letter, she showed it.
Watch for yourself, courtesy of Media Matters for America:
That didn’t stop Joe Scarborough from just ignoring those pesky facts when, on yesterday morning’s edition of Morning Joe he claimed that Hillary Clinton had disseminated “classified information” regarding “the source of a human intelligence agent on the ground in a war zone in Libya.”
JOE SCARBOROUGH: But also, she says something that is just, it is just so misleading and it’s so wrong, that I know you, of course, as much as anybody would know — when she talks about, and I can’t believe they’re still saying this. After the intelligence community has knocked this down. She says, “Well nothing was marked classified at the time.” That is the most ridiculous, inane justification —
BOB WOODWARD: It really is —
SCARBOROUGH: — it really is! Because what happened when the FBI found out what went through her server, and the CIA found out, the State Department, they immediately said, “Oh my god, we have to mark this classified, and they backdated it to the moment she typed some of these statements down. Because no, if she’s creating — if she’s generating a document at that moment that has classified information in it and she sends it, of course it’s not going to be stamped “classified”! If Sidney Blumenthal reveals the source, I think it was him — if somebody reveals the source of a human intelligence agent on the ground in a war zone in Libya, and it’s not marked classified? That doesn’t somehow make it right that its passes [sic] through her server and then it gets passed onto someone else, it’s ridiculous!
Who needs Fox News when you have MSNBC? You will remember that MSNBC got rid of actual journalists and kept Joe Scarborough. Scarborough has never been afraid to skate by the truth or, as he has shown here, outright ignore it.
Scarborough yesterday showed himself to be not only a liar, but a hypocrite as he accused Hillary Clinton of doing exactly what he spent his morning on air doing: saying things on television that he knows are not true.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
